Monthly Archive: May 2012

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

On a recent Meet the Press face-off between Democrats and Republicans, a politician claimed we urgently need to cut government spending. He embraced a plan to slash vital government programs and gut retirement security, while actually cutting taxes for the rich. The only tax hikes in his plan were targeted toward the already-devastated middle class.

EU authorities, supported by Spain’s government, are pushing a political agenda at the expense of economic recovery

I have argued for some time now that the recurring crisis in the eurozone is not driven by financial markets’ demands for austerity in a time of recession, as is commonly asserted. Rather, the primary cause of the crisis and its prolongation is the political agenda of the European authorities – led by the European Central Bank (ECB) and European commission. These authorities (which, if we included the IMF constitute, the “troika” that runs economic policy in the eurozone) want to force political changes, particularly in the weaker economies, that people in these countries would never vote for.

This is becoming more blatantly obvious here in Spain, where the government – run by the rightwing Popular party (PP) – shares the political agenda of the European authorities, perhaps even more than the IMF does. The PP government has taken advantage of the crisis to impose labour law changes that will make it easier for employers to get out of industry-wide collective bargaining agreements. They have also taken away rights that workers’ had to challenge unfair firings. The goal is to weaken labour as part of a longer-term strategy to dismantle the welfare state; these changes have nothing to do with resolving the current crisis, or even reducing the budget deficit.

No reporter has ever asked him as far as I know. I don’t know if any will ask this time around. What did you mean by “Change” anyway? He ran a whole campaign on it and does anyone really know what Barack Obama meant he was going to change?

I’m in the camp that he hasn’t changed a damn thing. People will counter with Lilly Ledbetter. It’s a lovely law, but does anyone really believe that’s what was meant by the grandiose statement “Change”?

Of course I use Lilly Ledbetter as a symbol. President Obama obviously has more accomplishments than that. He really did change the laws and many people’s perceptions on gay rights for example. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is history. The government is no longer defending the Defense of Marriage Act. And the President of the United States is finally for gay marriage. But did people really think Senator Obama meant he would change gay rights legislation? Is that what the 2008 election was about?

JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and the handful of other behemoths of Wall Street that dominate American banking – who needs them?

After enduring years of insatiable greed by the slick-fingered hucksters who run these gambling houses; after watching in dismay as their ineptness and avarice drained more than $19 trillion from America’s household wealth since 2007 and plunged our real economy into the worst financial crisis since the 1930s Depression; after witnessing their shameful demands for trillions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts to save their banks and their jobs; and now after seeing them return immediately to business as usual, including paying multimillion-dollar bonuses to themselves — we have to ask: Huh!?!

Oh, no-no, cry the banking titans, don’t even think of looking behind the curtain! Trust us, say these Wall Street alchemists, for we are essential to juicing the economy with our complex abracadabra investment schemes.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s protracted effort to fight extradition to Sweden suffered a body blow this week. Britain’s Supreme Court upheld the arrest warrant, issued in December 2010. After the court announced its split 5-2 decision, the justices surprised many legal observers by granting Assange’s lawyers an opportunity to challenge their decision-the first such reconsideration since the high-profile British extradition case from more than a decade ago against former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. The decision came almost two years to the day after Pvt. Bradley Manning was arrested in Iraq for allegedly leaking hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. government documents to WikiLeaks. The cases remind us that all too often whistle-blowers suffer, while war criminals walk.

Assange has not been charged with any crime, yet he has been under house arrest in England for close to two years, ever since a “European Arrest Warrant” was issued by Sweden (importantly, by a prosecutor, not by a judge). Hoping to question Assange, the prosecutor issued the warrant for suspicion of rape, unlawful coercion and sexual molestation. Assange offered to meet the Swedish authorities in their embassy in London, or in Scotland Yard, but was refused.

The revelation that President Barack Obama is personally selecting names for a kill list of suspected al-Qaida terrorists is a striking illustration of what actually occurs behind the White House’s closed doors.

The New York Times revealed Tuesday how the president “has placed himself at the helm of a top secret ‘nominations’ process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical.” He insists “on approving every new name on an expanding ‘kill list,’ poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre ‘baseball cards’ of an unconventional war.”

The Times described how more than 100 members of “the government’s sprawling national security apparatus” meet in a video conference to go over potential nominees for the death list and “recommend to the president who should be the next to die.” The nominations then go to the White House where Obama, guided by his top counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, approves names added to the list.

Counterinsurgency is out. Drones, assassination teams, targeted killings and special forces are in. A New York Times report on May 27 described the “existential debate” going on inside the faculty at West Point, the national military academy. Counterinsurgency doctrine from Vietnam-and the Philippines “insurgency” of 1899-1902-was refurbished by Gen. David Petraeus in the closing period of the Iraq War, and, combined with a sharp increase in troop strength (the “surge”), it was credited with ending the war there by confirming the Nouri al-Maliki Shiite government unsteadily in place.

After taking office as president, Barack Obama looked for a comparable success in Afghanistan. After consultations in Washington, and with Petraeus and the new commander of U.S. and Allied forces in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the president authorized a new “surge,” patterned on what seemed to have worked in Iraq. However, he added an important clause: The American troop reinforcement would be withdrawn in 18 months.

Hence his assurance to NATO officials in Chicago last week that U.S. (and NATO) combat forces are on their way out.

The famous tower clock known as Big Ben, located at the top of the 320-foot-high St. Stephen’s Tower, rings out over the Houses of Parliament in Westminster, London, for the first time on this day in 1859.

After a fire destroyed much of the Palace of Westminster–the headquarters of the British Parliament–in October 1834, a standout feature of the design for the new palace was a large clock atop a tower. The royal astronomer, Sir George Airy, wanted the clock to have pinpoint accuracy, including twice-a-day checks with the Royal Greenwich Observatory. While many clockmakers dismissed this goal as impossible, Airy counted on the help of Edmund Beckett Denison, a formidable barrister known for his expertise in horology, or the science of measuring time.

Denison’s design, built by the company E.J. Dent & Co., was completed in 1854; five years later, St. Stephen’s Tower itself was finished. Weighing in at more than 13 tons, its massive bell was dragged to the tower through the streets of London by a team of 16 horses, to the cheers of onlookers. Once it was installed, Big Ben struck its first chimes on May 31, 1859. Just two months later, however, the heavy striker designed by Denison cracked the bell. Three more years passed before a lighter hammer was added and the clock went into service again. The bell was rotated so that the hammer would strike another surface, but the crack was never repaired.

The main bell, officially known as the Great Bell, is the largest bell in the tower and part of the Great Clock of Westminster. The bell is better known by the nickname Big Ben.

The original bell was a 16.3-tonne (16 ton) hour bell, cast on 6 August 1856 in Stockton-on-Tees by John Warner & Sons. The bell was named in honour of Sir Benjamin Hall, and his name is inscribed on it. However, another theory for the origin of the name is that the bell may have been named after a contemporary heavyweight boxer Benjamin Caunt. It is thought that the bell was originally to be called Victoria or Royal Victoria in honour of Queen Victoria, but that an MP suggested the nickname during a Parliamentary debate; the comment is not recorded in Hansard.

Since the tower was not yet finished, the bell was mounted in New Palace Yard. Cast in 1856, the first bell was transported to the tower on a trolley drawn by sixteen horses, with crowds cheering its progress. Unfortunately, it cracked beyond repair while being tested and a replacement had to be made. The bell was recast at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry as a 13.76-tonne (13 1/2 ton) bell. This was pulled 200 ft up to the Clock Tower’s belfry, a feat that took 18 hours. It is 2.2 metres tall and 2.9 metres wide. This new bell first chimed in July 1859. In September it too cracked under the hammer, a mere two months after it officially went into service. According to the foundry’s manager, George Mears, Denison had used a hammer more than twice the maximum weight specified. For three years Big Ben was taken out of commission and the hours were struck on the lowest of the quarter bells until it was reinstalled. To make the repair, a square piece of metal was chipped out from the rim around the crack, and the bell given an eighth of a turn so the new hammer struck in a different place. Big Ben has chimed with an odd twang ever since and is still in use today complete with the crack. At the time of its casting, Big Ben was the largest bell in the British Isles until “Great Paul”, a 17 tonne (16 3/4 ton) bell currently hung in St Paul’s Cathedral, was cast in 1881.

Good news for the real left: an eight term House Democrat in the Texas 16th Congressional District went down in flames in a primary against former El Paso City Council representative:

Former city Rep. Beto O’Rourke bucked a nationwide trend Tuesday night by ousting eight-term U.S. Rep. Silvestre Reyes in the 16th Congressional District race.

In the final tally, O’Rourke beat Reyes by 23,248 votes to 20,427, or 50.5 percent to 44.4 percent.

Nationally, challengers rarely defeat incumbents in primary elections, and only a few exceptions have occurred so far this election cycle.

When the first numbers were posted earlier Tuesday evening — the results of early voting — O’Rourke had a healthy 51.3 percent to 43.3 percent lead, but Reyes was closing the gap as the evening progressed. However, he was not able to garner enough votes to push the race into a runoff election.

Rep. Reyes had the blessing of President Obama and former President Bill Clinton, who personally reaffirmed an endorsement delivered earlier in a video. The voters obviously were ready for real change by voting for O’Rourke who is opposed to the war on drugs arguing that drug laws increase profits for Mexican drug cartels and increase violence, as well as, real job stimulus by supporting government sponsored projects and a full service Veterans Hospital.

There are many reasons to be happy that Reyes lost. He is and was an awful Congressman, both stupid and craven. As Democratic leader of the Intelligence Committee, Reyes did not know the group Hezbollah, and he didn’t know whether Al Qaeda was Sunni or Shia. Reyes is a proponent of any number of authoritarian policies violating our civil liberties, and he is backed by predator drone cash. So if you like militarizing, well, everything, then Reyes is your man. And this has been the trend recently.

So it’s nice to see voters choose peace over war, and an end the war on drugs. Now that a candidate won a significant race while arguing for drug decriminalization, it’s going to be increasingly more difficult for politicians to avoid debating the issue. And that’s good.

The 16th CD is located in a heavily Democratic El Paso and since it creation in 1903 has had only one Republican representative who lasted just one term. So, in all probability Mr. O’Rourke will handily defeat his Republican Barbara Carrasco in November holding the seat and moving it left.

Those of you that read this regular series know that I am from Hackett, Arkansas, just a mile or so from the Oklahoma border, and just about 10 miles south of the Arkansas River. It was a rural sort of place that did not particularly appreciate education, and just zoom onto my previous posts to understand a bit about it.

I have mentioned my grandfather Smith before, and in passing said that he had bought a tractor since at 88 he was too old to pass a driver’s test. In Arkansas there is a specific exemption from having to have a driver’s license when one is operating “implements of husbandry” on public roadways, mostly to let underage kids help their families run the farm.

The loophole worked very well for him, because the mile and a half one way walk to town was getting to be too much for him, especially in the heat of the summer and the dead of winter. He always needed to go to town for something or other like Prince Albert or other things, and he liked to hang out with the guys who would sit in front of John Mackey’s little store and chew the fat.

The Occupy movement has sent out a Call to Action for a June 20th “Global Festival” to celebrate their global demand for a Universal Living Wage:

The regime of wholesale robbery – what the 1% call “austerity” – is already falling across Europe, and soon will fall across the world. But the inevitable collapse of austerity is not enough. We, the 99%, demand a world beyond Wall Street. We demand a system where everyone can not only survive, but flourish. To reach this world, we are raising our voices to demand a universal living wage.

We call on all occupies, unions, community organizations, immigrants rights groups, bodies, religious organizations, environmental groups, anti-poverty activists, and everyone to join us June 20th, 2012 for a new holiday for the 99%: A Global Festival for the Universal Living Wage.

No, Karl Marx, dead since 1883, is not now able to report on the events of the Occupy Movement, as he did on events of the U.S.’s Civil War for the NY Herald Tribune in the 1860’s and the Paris Commune in the 1870’s, but strangely, to this day, the mere mention of his name still strikes terror into the hearts of global capitalists and their media puppets, such as Sean Hannity. Link to…

There must be a reason that the capitalist powers of the 21st century tremble at his name 129 years after his death, his writing must have been very dangerous indeed. How much they must be fear of Tim Poole’s live-streaming. No wonder they arrested him this month in Chicago!. Read below to understand why Karl Marx, and especially his writing on the Paris Commune, was such a danger to capitalism.

[I]t is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.

It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.

During the Bush administration the Democrats were opposed to the unitary executive powers that Bush assumed. When they realized how intrusive the government had becomes post 9/11 with surveillance, warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens, torture, indefinite detention, military commissions, Guantanamo and the general disregard for the rule of law, the Democrats railed against those policies. What happened that all these polices and now, targeted assassinations without due process have become acceptable? It is incomprehensible that under a Democratic president the right wing shredding of the Constitution is reasonable and defended by those who most vociferously opposed it.

Apologists for the president’s “just trust me” approach to targeted killings emphasize that the program is highly successful and claim that the drone strikes are extraordinarily precise. John Brennan, the president’s counter-terrorism adviser, said in a recent speech that not a single non-combatant had been killed in a year of drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And today’s Times article quoted a senior administration official who said that civilian deaths were in the “single digits.”

But it turns out that even this hey-it’s-better-than-carpet-bombing justification is rather flimsy. The Times article says “Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties …It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.”

The logic, such as it is, is that people who hang around places where Qaeda operatives hang around must be up to no good. That’s the sort of approach that led to the false imprisonment of thousands of Iraqis, including the ones tortured at Abu Ghraib. Mr. Obama used to denounce that kind of thinking.

So now just living in a village where the US thinks, there are insurgents, be they really Al Qaeda or just people defending their country from invaders, all men in the vicinity are enemy combatants, the President can have you killed and they can prove their innocence post mortem. As Cenk Uygur stated, “This is deeply immoral”

“Memorial Day weekend brought news of more U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan as The New York Times raises new questions about President Obama’s so-called “Kill List” of terrorists targeted for assassination. An extensive report in Tuesday’s paper looks at the use of targeted attacks to take out terrorism suspects in other parts of the world, an increasingly important part of the government’s anti-terrorism policies that Barack Obama himself has taken personal responsibility for. According to the story, the President approves every name on the list of terrorism targets, reviewing their biographies and the evidence against them, and then authorizing “lethal action without hand-wringing.”

As the president has slowly drawn down American forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, the use of drone attacks to take out senior leaders of al-Qaeda

and the Taliban has become the primary tactic for fighting terrorism overseas. However, it raises a lot of legal and ethical questions about extra-judicial killings of individuals, particularly those who happen to be American citizens…”.

{T]oday the harm that’s caused by raining death from machines in the sky down onto far too many civilians — including someone’s son, brother, or father who wasn’t “up to no good” at all — vastly outweighs any good. Righteous anger over the killing of civilians creates new terrorists faster than the killing of any old ones. As for the morally indefensible position that any male killed in such an attack is “probably up to no good,” isn’t the Obama administration saying the EXACT same thing that George Zimmerman said about Trayvon Martin? [..]

Actually, the similarity with Zimmerman is even greater than I first thought. What he said to the Sanford police dispatcher was that Trayvon Martin “looks like he’s up to no good.” Thank God Zimmerman didn’t have drones, huh?

Some of us on the left, many of whom supported President Obama in 2008, have some very serious issues with this President and those of his supporters who are choosing now to ignore all the horrendous violations of US and International law and the continued trampling of our rights and freedoms, but are now wholeheartedly accepting and defending these policies (Warning: link leads to a right wing Obama 527). They would love it if Obama’s critics would just sit down and shut up.

What has happened to Democrats who were willing to call for not just the impeachment but the arrest and prosecution of both George W. Bush and Dick Cheney? Now Barack Obama has taken those same policies a step further and made them acceptable to his loyal supporters but not to those of us who still hold to the same principles we did eleven years ago.

At the root of Spain’s financing crisis has been a drastic outflow of foreign capital from the country – one that, paradoxically, has been accentuated by the European Central Bank’s much-vaunted program of providing low-cost three-year loans to European banks so that they might buy their governments’ bonds.

…

But in the case of Spain, the program evidently bought time by making the country’s underlying problems all the worse. Spanish banks have by far been the most aggressive participants in the cheap-loan program, having borrowed more than €300 billion from the E.C.B. And much of that money was spent on Spanish government bonds.

…

It’s not just Spain, either.

Italian banks have also been enthusiastic buyers of their government’s bonds, and they own 57 percent of bonds outstanding. As in the case of Spain, foreigners have been obliging sellers and have sold €242 billion worth of bonds to local banks, bringing their share in Italian bond holdings down to 35 percent as of this March compared with 51 percent late last year.

It is worth noting that just before the restructuring of private-sector Greek debt in March, foreign investors owned 32 percent of the bonds outstanding, a higher proportion than what foreigners now own in Spain.

The fact is this notional overestimation of wealth is going to have to come of the pockets of the rich because that’s where the money is. If you seized everything from the bottom 50% it simply wouldn’t be enough.

So how does this play out? Here’s one way – Falsely disenfranchized Floridians appeal to Obama’s Justice Dept. Eric Holder makes noises that “this is an outrage.” Republicans make noises that “this is just political, and besides (shh, Holder has, well, melatonal ties that disqualify his etc., but shh).”

The White House, certain of November victory anyway, decides to back down. No need to ruffle R feathers.

Holder then makes all the right public noises, but does little to actually block this. (My best guess at the explanation: it’s a matter for “the courts,” plus something about the “states.”)

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

The federal minimum wage is now $7.25 cents an hour, about $15,080 for a full time, year round worker. At that level, it means poverty wages for a family of three, and weakened demand for the economy. As Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan and New York’s bishops concluded, this leaves workers “on the brink of homelessness, with not enough in their paychecks to pay for the most basic of necessities, like food, medicine or clothing for their children.”

Poverty wages offend both justice and common sense. It is time to raise the floor.

If today’s minimum wage were at its previous height in 1968, adjusted for inflation, it would be over $10.00 an hour.

The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) estimates that the recently-introduced proposal by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) to lift the minimum wage to $9.80 over three years would give 28 million workers a raise. In a time of faltering growth, this money would be immediately spent, a direct boost to demand and the economy.

It’s no secret that money and politics enjoy a nasty love affair in this country. And as Ari Berman has written here, the problem has gotten even worse this cycle after the ill-fated Citizens United decision unleashed the power of Super PACs. As he reports, campaigns are increasingly reliant on that money, yet “Super PACs on both sides of the aisle are financed by the 1 percent of the 1 percent.” That means the rich have an even more outsized impact on the outcome of the election.

At the same time, it’s been hard to miss the GOP’s relentless campaign to roll back voting rights in the name of eliminating the (mostly imaginary) threat of fraud. Many of those tactics will severely impact low-income voters and likely suppress their turnout in November, handing even more power over to the 1 percent.

There’s something else that suppresses their vote, however, even if they are legally able to do so. And that something is income inequality, as a new report from the OECD on the Better Life Index shows. Of the thirty-four countries included in the report, the U.S. ranks second to last in social inequality, bested only by South Korea. When it comes to income inequality we are at the extreme end of the scale, with levels similar to those of Cameroon, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Ecuador, Nepal and Uganda.

Memo to the Earth Summit: ‘Green Economy’ should not mean monetizing nature

The 1992 Rio Earth summit established “sustainable development” firmly in the global political lexicon – even though the term meant, and continues to mean, different things to different people. For Stephan Schmidheiny, a CEO who was appointed chief adviser for business and industry at the summit and subsequently set up the World Business Council on Sustainable Development, it apparently means continuing with business as usual: in February, he was sentenced to 16 years in prison for the deaths of thousands of workers at his asbestos-cement factory.

As the Rio+20 anniversary conference approaches, a battle rages over the definition of another term: “green economy”. “A green economy in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication” is a key conference theme. It sounds good, but what does it mean?

A coalition of thousands of mainly university students, unionized workers, and farmers in Mexico City have taken to the streets to demand greater freedom of speech and also to protest the possible return of power by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

The PRI is a member of the Socialist International, but don’t let the name fool you-the party is actually quite “centrist” (the term pundits usually use to describe center-right parties) in most of its policies. PRI’s main rival is the left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). (Mexican Spring poster in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street, via @mexicoOWS).

Dubbed the “Yo Soy 132” movement (Twitter users can follow protest updates by searching #YoSoy132), or the “Mexican Spring” by observers, this latest wave of protests marks the third large student demonstration in less than a week.

Many are wondering if making Wisconsin a “Right to Work” state is next on Governor Scott Walker’s agenda if he wins the recall election on June 5. Right to Work laws weaken unions by allowing members to opt out of paying dues. Workers get the benefit of working in a union shop (higher wages, better benefits), but are not required to pay their fair share for union representation. Right to Work laws have been used effectively in the South to bust unions and keep wages low, which is why they are dubbed “Right to Work for Less” laws by opponents. The recent push for this legislation is emanating from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), where corporations and right-wing legislators vote as equals behind closed doors on “model” legislation.

This issue is newly on the radar of Wisconsin voters due to a video released earlier this month by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel showing Governor Walker having a frank conversation with his largest campaign contributor shortly after he was elected. Beloit billionaire Diane Hendricks asks Walker how he will make Wisconsin a “red” state and if he will “work on these unions” and “become a Right to Work” state. Walker replies that the”first step” will be “to divide and conquer” Wisconsin unions through a budget bill dealing with public sector workers. One month after the video was filmed, Walker “dropped the bomb” and introduced his bill to strip some 380,000 public workers of 50 years of collective bargaining rights, starting a race to the bottom in wages and benefits.

I find it hard to believe that the Fund staff disagree that action is needed right now. It is far more likely that they (and, not least, the IMF’s Managing Director, Christine Lagarde) felt unable to take on the government of what remains an important member country. That is also what the BBC’s Stephanie Flanders suggests in her excellent post, “IMF: ‘Great Policies: Shame about the Economy‘.”

The time for aggressive fiscal consolidation is when the economy – by which I mean spending by the private sector – is strong, not weak, as it is now. What, then, is the argument against using fiscal policy more aggressively, to support the economy now? As Jonathan Portes, director of the National Institute for Economic and Social Research, notes, it is very hard to make one.

The principal argument against any fiscal action now, apart from the hope against implausible hope that monetary policy is going to do the job, even though interest rates are almost zero and the Bank of England has indulged in substantial “quantitative easing”, is that it will destroy the government’s credibility, lead to a rapid spike in interest rates and so weaken the economy, rather than strengthen it.

(A) willingness to make determined use of fiscal policy should also reduce the uncertainty of decision-makers about the likely direction of the economy. If businesses think the authorities are not determined to sustain demand, they are right to be more cautious. Ultimately, the government insures business against the macroeconomic risks of investment, via its determination to sustain demand in a slump. But the government has shown no such determination, with effects on the willingness of business to invest that we now see. Thus, the very determination to act might make a huge difference to the outcome for the economy.

In brief, the endlessly repeated “credibility” arguments against a change in fiscal policy are feeble. The UK has fiscal levers at its disposal and should use them.

What is true, however, is that a change would weaken the government’s credibility. But this is because the government made an unwise commitment.